22-Year-Old Describes 2019 as 'Back in the Day'

Aiden Park, 22, a senior at the University of Michigan, has described the year 2019 as 'back in the day' in a conversation with coworkers at his internship, triggering an existential crisis among every person in the room over the age of 30. 'Back in the day, like 2019, we used to actually go to parties,' Park said during a lunch break, in the same tone one might use to describe the Eisenhower administration. 'Like, in person. At someone's house. It was a whole different era.' Park was seventeen in 2019. 'He said era,' said coworker Melissa Chen, 34. 'He called 2019 an era. I bought my couch in 2019. It's in my apartment right now. I'm sitting on it. Is my couch from a different era?' The comment reflects a temporal perception gap that researchers have documented in digital-native populations. Dr. James Whitfield of the University of Chicago's Digital Culture Institute has studied the phenomenon and found that for people who came of age during the pandemic, the pre-2020 world exists in memory with a separation and distance typically associated with much longer time spans. 'For a 22-year-old, 2019 was the last year of childhood as they knew it,' Dr. Whitfield explained. 'Everything after March 2020 was a different experience. So 2019 feels as distant to them as the 1990s feel to a 40-year-old. It's not about calendar time. It's about experiential time.' Park has also referred to Instagram in 2018 as 'vintage social media,' described Vine as 'ancient,' and called the iPhone X 'retro tech.' When informed that the iPhone X was released in 2017, he replied, 'Exactly. That was like a generation ago.' Chen has begun moisturizing more aggressively. 'He's going to describe my birth year as prehistoric,' she said. 'I can feel it coming. I was born in 1992 and to this kid, that's the Mesozoic era.'